working

Artforum!

amywilson — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 15:22:29 +0000

I know, I’ve been off the grid for a little while. Things have just been super hectic. But I have to share this little gem… yay, Artforum, baby!!

New York

“Campaign”

C24 GALLERY
514 West 24th Street
January 12–February 25

In the neon pink zine-catalogue produced for this group show, curator Amy Smith-Stewart describes a heightened cultural hostility to women’s bodies fostered by contemporary mass media that traffic in “unattainable avatars” of femininity. Celebrity culture, reality television, and social networking are her particular culprits, and with “Campaign” she rallies against their imagemaking monopoly. But if the artists don’t present an alternative propaganda front, as the exhibition’s tongue-in-cheek title suggests they might, their disunited, often humorous challenges to “our prevailing depictions of women” still add up to an exciting chaos of dissent. Beyond the works’ common strategies (largely appropriation and collage) and recurring themes (fashion, porn, tabloid stars, and the nude), they reveal other surprising threads of camaraderie.

Kathe Burkhart’s Liz Taylor paintings are a perverse homage to misogynist projection. In Beaver: From the Liz Taylor Series (publicity shot) (all works cited, 2011), a deck of strip-poker playing cards silhouette the flatly painted Hollywood icon, and a shaggy length of fake fur, affixed as Taylor’s stole, underscores the obscenity of the red text that bisects the canvas like a protest sign: BEAVER. Burkhart’s painting shares a corner with a like-mindedly antivirtuosic, but quieter, piece by Amy Wilson. Reminiscent of a strange school project, Fashion for Co-Joined Twins is an expository text about the confluence of fashion and fascism beginning with the Nazi occupation of Paris, penciled on a series of brown kraft paper pages and illustrated with embroidered figures clothed in surreal designs for the conjoined. These works shine as stylistic oddities even among this very diverse gathering of work.

Jill Magid’s From a Distance You Don’t Look Anything like a Friend also sticks out—as a nonfigurative installation piece (a passage of appropriated text is impressed into the gallery’s drywall alongside an inverted neon arc), but also as a more oblique contribution to Smith-Stewart’s activist aims regarding “this world of interchangeable, digitally manipulated homogenous girls.” Magid takes her text from Lt. Col. Dave Grossman’s influential 2009 book On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Online controversies surrounding law enforcement protocol, combat-based video games, and post-traumatic stress disorder populate the Internet rabbit hole of further research on Grossman’s ideas about desensitization and conditioned killing—perhaps an appropriate, if disturbing, maze to find oneself in when considering this show’s ultimate concern with the exposure and disruption of dehumanization in our particular moment of new media immersion.

— Johanna Fateman

New Years greetings

amywilson — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 15:06:15 +0000

I found this randomly through Facebook – a few people I know have linked to it. It’s just perfect, because it’s so much what has been in my head for the last couple of months. Just had to pass it on.

Happy 2012!

**Quick update to below post

amywilson — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 01:56:32 +0000

I had a few people at SVA ask me if there’s some way they can buy a porcelain girl (see below) and not pay for shipping. Yes! Go to the store and enter FREESHIPSVA and it will waive shipping for you! This only works for SVA people, though… I can’t drop them off anywhere else.

And remember… if you want one, hurry!! They’re only available til the 15th!!

Porcelain girls

amywilson — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 21:46:10 +0000

SPECIAL SALE = FINISHED!!!! THANK YOU EVERYONE!!

~~A special treat for my blog people…~~

A lot of people have asked me if my edition of porcelain figurines will be available by Christmas. Technically, the answer is no – I don’t have time to make the boxes for them that I want and to go back and forth to the post office, and still get them out to folks in time for the holidays. But! Since you asked, I decided to make some available without the box for a super limited time.

If you place your order between now and the 15th, you will get a porcelain girl at a very special price! Each one is handmade and unique (they are not made by casting molds; each one is hand-carved and original), and they are signed and dated on the bottom under the stand. They’re about 4 1/2″ tall, and there’s a mix of blue, pink, and purple dresses, and brown, blond, and reddish-haired girls.

~~Seriously, if you want one, get on it now – there’s not that many, the price is great, and there’s just a few days!! If you miss it this time,~~ they will be re-released in February (along with the Girls With Souls) but priced higher and even fewer to go around.

I hope you like them!

New painting

amywilson — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 15:51:26 +0000

This one is a little bigger than the other two I posted – it’s 12 x 16. And boy, do I need to get these professionally photographed. Shooting them in my studio just isn’t really doing it.

Two new tiny paintings

amywilson — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 02:01:21 +0000

As promised, here are some images of the 5 x 7 paintings…

Sneak peak

amywilson — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 23:49:31 +0000

I’ve been hesitant to post new work on here, mostly because I want to really reveal it all as a series and also, I feel like the size and the physical object is important to see in the work, both of which you lose online.

But then, I’m also getting way too precious with things. I’m psyched with the way things are going, so I’m trying to keep it all special… but maybe I’m keeping it too special. So here, at least, is a sneak peak. I took this pic so that you could see me in relation to the work, and get a sense of the scale. Over the next couple of days, I’ll start scanning and photographing the work I’ve done and posting cleaner pics up here to look at.

But for now…

Get it? It’s a teeny-tiny painting on wood panel. It’s 5 x 7 inches. And it’s not painted directly on the panel; it’s actually collaged bits of paper that have acrylic on them, that come together for the image. (You can’t really tell any of this from the pic above, but hopefully between that picture and the scan later this week, it will be understandable.)

My plan is to make about 15 of these. I have several series of small works going on right now, so this is just one of a few different groupings I’m working on.

Report from Miami

amywilson — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 15:12:38 +0000

Hey! I’m back after four very long days and nights at the Miami fairs. I’m happy to be home, but I had a lot of fun.

The fairs have changed a lot since the frothy days of the mid-2000s. There was a lot less of the craziness that marked previous fairs; fewer pop-up shows, guerrilla art actions, beach parades, and general wackiness. The container show and its sidekick the PS1 radio station are no longer there, and are sorely missed. But the shows are still solid, sales were up for everyone, and that meant a lot of good moods all around.

A guy I met in Miami told me that blog readers like to read “short, punchy lists” and that if I’m going to blog, that’s how I ought to do it. Okay! So in the spirit of Miami, I thought I’d recap my trip that way:

Best work at the big fair: Galerie Berinson, Unica Zurn. How the hell were these Zurns (there’s only one on the site but there were two in the booth) not in the retrospective? They’re the best work by the artist I’ve ever seen, and I’m a big fan so that says a lot.

Best suddenly super-hot material: Clay. As in, ceramics. Really. There were loads of ceramics-based works to be seen everywhere – each fair I went to had several different artists all suddenly working in clay. Cool, but weird that it’s suddenly popular.

Best chance meeting: Bumping into Andrea Bowers and Olga Koumoundouros, who were participating in Art Basel’s Art Public, who set up camp over where the containers and PS1’s sound stage used to be, giving out food and talking social justice ala Occupy Wall Street. The “sculpture” changed every day; here’s a snapshot of Thursday:

It was funky and raw. They invited activists from different local groups involved in housing advocacy to come and give talks every evening. Very, very different from the usual Art Basel public project! A nice respite from selling selling selling. By the time of my last visit, it seemed that everyone involved was getting the flu or otherwise exhausted; I hope they got home ok.

Best open-to-everyone party: Mr. Brainwash. Can it be true?? One of the very few non-official, pop-up spaces I encountered. I wanted to hate it, but I didn’t. I swear, if you squint in this picture, you can see a dj above that big can of “spilled paint.”

Anyway, it was truly a party atmosphere, very little posturing, and it is what it is (or it was what it was, I guess).

Worst thing about the fairs: The evil black hole the shuttle busses kept falling into en route to Wynwood. Also, the lack of signage for the shuttles, and general absence of a schedule. Basically, the shuttles blew. You had to allow 2 hours+ to make what should have been a 15 minute drive. And remember, time is short and there’s a million things to see. Yeah, that was fun.

Worst invite-only party: Bass Museum of Art. I’m not suggesting that these events have to be super exclusive, but there’s a difference between that and cramming as many people as you can into a space and calling it a party. You couldn’t see the art, you couldn’t see other people, you couldn’t move or breathe. Really not a good idea.

And last, but definitely not least:

Best cheap vegan eats: La Sandwicheria. Miami Beach isn’t known for good cheap food, let alone good, cheap, vegan food. But MY GOD. The veggie sandwich at this place was KILLER. It was one of those sandwiches you look at when it arrives and think, “Holy crap, I can’t possibly eat all of that.” And then ten seconds later, it’s completely gone. Whoa, I could go for one right now.

Seven Miami!

amywilson — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 02:13:57 +0000

If you’ll be in Miami for the fairs, come check me out (along with Katie Armstrong!) at Seven Miami! 2637 N. Miami Ave at NE 27th, in the Winwood District. BBQ Tuesday from 5 – 7:30pm!

Pics and more forthcoming…

Pop up cards

amywilson — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 15:34:40 +0000

I made an edition of pop up cards for BravinLee to give out as invitations to what they’re up to in Miami. It took FOREVER… printing everything on my home epson printer, cutting them out, carefully pasting them… argh. So it’s been really nice to hear that people like them – makes it all worth it!!

I got this especially nice mention on the Hyperallergic blog, along with a video of the cards. Yay!

An aside:

You can probably tell that this blog is suffering while I deal with end-of-the-semester craziness + Miami stuff + art stuff + OWS stuff. But bear with me. I’ll be back in force very soon, promise.